Pushing the bar in R.I.: 5 women who blazed trails through the legal system

Katie Mulvaney Journal Staff Writer kmulvane

Monday

Apr 8, 2019 at 9:08 PMApr 9, 2019 at 7:12 AM

Roger Williams University School of Law on Thursday plans to commemorate the 176 women admitted to the Rhode Island bar during the first 60 years after the state Supreme Court determined in 1920 that that they were permitted, legally, to sit for the bar examination.

PROVIDENCE — A stroll through the Licht Judicial Complex on a given weekday reveals a multitude of female prosecutors, defense lawyers and civil litigators. Female judges lead the state's District and Superior courts. Close to two dozen women are seated on the bench across the Rhode Island judiciary, including one on the state Supreme Court.

It's hard to imagine that just decades ago, men vastly outnumbered women in courtrooms and at law firms across the nation and here at home.

Roger Williams University School of Law on Thursday plans to commemorate the 176 women admitted to the Rhode Island bar during the first 60 years after the state Supreme Court determined in 1920 that that they were permitted, legally, to sit for the bar examination. A plaque honoring these so-called legal pioneers will be dedicated from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday at the law school, on the Bristol campus.

It was Ada Sawyer who led the way, petitioning to become Rhode Island's first female lawyer. The request gave the state Board of Bar Examiners pause. Its members questioned whether she qualified as a "person" eligible to take the examination.

"After consideration," Supreme Court Justice William H. Sweetland wrote in response, "we are of the opinion that the word 'person' contained in the rules regulating the admission of attorneys and counselors should be construed to include a woman as well as a man."

With that, Sawyer went on to maintain an active practice for 63 years, until 1983. She died two years later.

While the court's 1920 decision opened the door, many women's hopes of becoming lawyers crashed with the Great Depression. During the first 40 years after Sawyer's admission, only 18 more female lawyers were admitted to the bar, according to research conducted by the law school over the past year. It would take until the 1970s before the state would see those numbers rise markedly as more women began enrolling in law schools.

The Journal asked five of the state's female trailblazers to share their reflections on the legal profession then and now. While each woman interviewed had a different experience, the thread that binds them all is their formidable work ethic, driven by their desire to succeed in what was then a profession dominated by men.

To hear the audio highlights, visit www.providencejournal.com.

Celebrating the First Women Lawyers in Rhode Island is open to the public. Registration is required at https://app.mobilecause.com/form/GylpnQ?vid=nfc6

Arlene Violet

Arlene Violet made history in 1985 by becoming the first female attorney general in Rhode Island — and the nation.

She brought with her gumption cultivated as a nun with the Sisters of Mercy, can-do spirit learned at home, and insight from years working with the inner-city poor.

But before she took the historic title as the state’s first and still only female chief law enforcement officer, she ranked among a handful of trailblazing women to head to law school at a time when they were vastly outnumbered by men.

“My family always raised us that we could do anything, so when I went to law school. I didn’t think anything untoward about going there,” Violet, 75, of Barrington, said in a recent interview.

She enrolled in Boston College Law School in 1971, with her religious superiors’ blessings.

“With my professors as well as my male classmates, I couldn’t have asked for a better experience,” she said.

After a clerkship, Attorney General Julius C. Michaelson hired her to crack down on false advertising and deceptive practices as head of the fraud division. “It was the Wild West out there in terms of consumers not having any rights,” she said.

She prosecuted mobsters for misleading “little old ladies” about paving jobs.

“In my own mind, I couldn’t decipher between what part of what I was seeing was because of being a woman or a nun or both,” she recalled. “But I was in many ways an overachiever because I wanted to prove that women could do this, and that nuns could do this.”

Witnessing the powerlessness of crime victims propelled her first run for attorney general, in 1982. She lost that election, but remained perturbed about the Colombian drug cartel creeping north. Mob boss Raymond Patriarca maintained his hold on the region, she said.

She wanted to run again, but this time Bishop Louis Gelineau told her she’d have to give up her role with the Sisters if she won. She opted to give it up, not because she thought she’d win but to raise important issues on the campaign trail.

She won. “It’s interesting to me that it took until the mid-'80s for any woman to be elected attorney general in the United States. Thank God, now it’s commonplace,” Violet said.

Challenges abounded. Prosecutors were dining at mob restaurants and allowing mobsters to pick up the tab.

“I also felt that judges were sitting on cases for which they had a humongous conflict of interest, so I would ask them to recuse themselves, and that was like so unheard of. I was public enemy number one by daring to suggest that they couldn’t be impartial,” she said.

She became the first person to call for state Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph Bevilacqua’s impeachment, she said. She fired the chief of the criminal division for buying a condominium from a person under two state indictments.

“It was a very rancorous time, but I think it was less again because I was a woman but more it was coming face to face with the institutionalized conflicts of interest that were deemed OK here in the state,” she said.

She made a point of hiring women.

Did she view the judiciary as an old boy’s network at the time? “Charter members of the old boys’ network, absolutely,” she said.

Violet ultimately returned to public interest law after losing a reelection bid and leaving office in 1987.

Reflecting on the current state of affairs for women in the law, Violet referenced a recent article saying that juries found that female lawyers being emotional during arguments detracted from their performance in court.

“I regret that women who are so committed about what they’re doing have to tone it down, so society still has a way to go I think in accepting women attorneys,” she said.

Still, she said, “I think little girls should have the opportunity to take it for granted that they could become a lawyer.”

Louise Durfee

Louise Durfee recalls a professor singling her out at Yale Law School in the 1950s during an exercise demonstrating whether a contract's terms had been substantially performed.

"Miss Durfee," he called out with a German accent.

"Of course, I was pretty shy in those days, and the last thing I wanted to be was noted," Durfee, now 88, said. "It was sort of unnerving."

At the time, she was one of five female students in a class of about 120. It wouldn't be the only time Durfee would be singled out through the years.

There was the time, too, when associates with the old Providence firm Edwards & Angell visited the Yale campus to recruit young lawyers. Durfee had two successful interviews.

Then came a letter that she says she preserved and carried with her for years. "It said how much they enjoyed meeting me, but that they had a woman," Durfee quipped in the Tiverton home her grandparents once lived in.

She landed in New York City after earning her degree, starting her career as a corporate lawyer. She became the first female lawyer to do in-house antitrust at the Socony Mobil Oil Company.

Each week, her male colleagues would have lunch together. "They had a lawyers' lunch, and I was never invited," Durfee said. She complained and, even so, it would be three years before she would be asked to join.

"We have all paid our dues," Durfee said of women who entered the legal profession in those early years.

It was corporate work that brought her to Rhode Island to defend Mobil against a lawsuit brought by the state, accusing the company of sparking price wars by selling oil below cost, she said. Tillinghast, Collins & Graham extended her an offer to join the Providence firm for $12,000 as its first female lawyer — a prospect not warmly received by some of the partners.

"You can do research, but clients will not accept your advice," she recalled being told.

One partner, the late Andrew DiPrete, brother of former Gov. Edward DiPrete, took her under his wing.

She ran for Tiverton Town Council. "Honestly, I look back and say that was a major-league confidence builder, not because I had it going in, but it forced me to be in the public to take positions and not be afraid."

The post raised her public profile and propelled her on a career trajectory that would see her serve as the first general counsel for the Narragansett Bay Commission, counsel for Rhode Island Housing and director of the state Department of Environmental Management. She became the first female bar examiner and the first woman to sit on the Commission on Judicial Tenure and Discipline.

"Honestly, I think [Supreme Court Justice] Florence Murray unseen had a role in some of these things. She was very supportive of women in the ranks," Durfee said.

“In a lot of ways I look back and say I had opportunities that my male peers did not have, and I can’t tell you if it was just the time, the opening up of things. I do not know but I’m very grateful,” she said.

“I have had a wonderful, varied experience. It did not start out that way."

Judge Patricia A. Sullivan

In 1978, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Patricia A. Sullivan became the third woman to join the then-Edwards & Angell firm in Providence. A few years later, she became the first associate to get pregnant, launching the storied firm into unknown territory.

Sullivan recently recalled, in chambers thick with files, of telling only her longtime secretary her big news. Her secretary, in turn, told another secretary, who just so happened to tell her boss, an executive committee member.

"They held an emergency meeting. They didn't know what to do," Sullivan said.

Her colleague and mentor, Deming Sherman, intervened, assuring the committee that they'd figure it out.

"There was no template," Sullivan said. Women were just beginning to enter the legal profession, but no one had considered pregnancy leave. Sullivan gave birth to her son, and to another a few years later.

Pairing motherhood with a demanding career specializing in antitrust litigation posed some complicated challenges for Sullivan.

"Oh, it's a mess. It's a hot mess," Sullivan said of her years juggling raising her young children with her work. There was no Internet. No telecommuting.

She invested in a 40-foot telephone cord so she could call clients far out of earshot of her little ones' racket. She was convinced, and to this day still believes, that clients wouldn't have tolerated her working from home in the presence of young children.

"That would not have been good," she said.

She brought the kids in to work on the weekends, and occasionally camped a sick kid out under her desk — all out of sight of senior management. She tried every babysitting strategy, but daycare remained a disaster, she said. She even started going in to work at 5 a.m., picking the kids up after school, and resuming her work in the evening, but found herself getting sick.

She enlisted the help of her secretary, who sometimes cared for the boys when they were sick.

"I had a great secretary.... She would help me hide them because no one could know they were there," said Sullivan, who in 2012 became the first woman to serve as a federal magistrate judge in Rhode Island.

Another female lawyer got pregnant, and the firm began devising a plan to better support families.

"The firm was fabulous. The firm really worked with me," she said.

Still, Sullivan recalled being a "victim" of the reality that men were higher earners because they could more easily generate clients in a male-dominated world.

"Mothers of young children who are responsible for raising their own children do not spend Saturdays on golf courses. And if the golf course is where you generate business, then until your children are grown enough that you can leave them alone all day Saturday, you’re just not competing in that business," Sullivan observed.

"I always felt I had to work harder," Sullivan, of Barrington, said.

It's a wall that remains, though Sullivan is optimistic that change is afoot as more women enter the profession.

“Even though I had a very supportive platform in my law firm, when I went out into the world I was facing a wall of men and an expectation that they wanted to work with other men. I think that’s changed," she said.

Connie Howes

Connie Howes picked up golf as a young lawyer — not for the love of it, but as a strategy to help generate clients in a profession dominated by men.

"So I played golf poorly," Howes said in a recent interview reflecting on her legal career. Howes, of Providence, is one of 176 women being honored as trailblazers in the legal profession by Roger Williams University School of Law.

Howes was the third woman to join the Providence firm Tillinghast, Collins & Graham not long after she graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1978. Over the ensuing years, two other female associates added to the ranks.

"We had a substantial minority, I guess you would say," she said.

Still, she and the other women found themselves confronted by the reality that male partners could much more easily generate business from other men.

"To the extent that businesses are owned by men, that is going to be a continuing challenge for them," Howes said of female attorneys.

Howes, the former president and CEO of Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, told of mentors — male and female — teaching her the practice of corporate law. But, at the same time, one partner maintained a "no two-women" rule in doling out legal work.

Once he was forced to rely on two female lawyers to handle one business transaction. Howes recalled later asking the client for his thoughts.

“I said, 'You know, did it bother you that the two women were representing you?' He said, 'Well, we walked out of there and looked at each other and said oh [expletive], two girls.' So they were a little doubtful until we were able to show them that we were successful in the courtroom, we were successful in representing them. Clearly there was an initial reluctance on their part," Howes said.

It's such challenges that Howes and other so-called female legal pioneers tackled with patient persistence.

"There are still a lot of challenges for women lawyers in some of their positions and the best way to accept those challenges and to overcome them is to be really well-prepared," Howes said.

Howes remembered, too, approaching one partner about why he failed to include her on a corporate closing in Washington state.

"It really hurt my feelings," she said.

"He said, 'Well, you're a married woman. How would it look if I traveled with a married woman?' ... That was his old-styled way of looking at the world and that held me back," Howes said.

But by far the greatest challenge for Howes came after her children were born. A partner approached her during her first week back after her first child was born.

"One of the partners came in and said, 'OK, Connie, we've got this big deal. We've got to work the whole weekend on this. This is great,'" she said.

"I just looked at him and said, 'I can't work all weekend. I have a tiny little baby at home.' He just got so angry he just kind of huffed and stomped out of my office, and I thought, 'Wow, it's a good thing I became a partner ... if I hadn't, he never would have voted for me,'" she said.

Three years later, after the birth of her son, she dropped down to 80-percent time, with a big pay cut, to spend more time with the kids.

Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson

Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson became the second woman and the first African American confirmed to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010.

"To me it’s still disgraceful that I’m only the second woman to ever be on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.... I’m two, and I’m the first and only African American to be on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals," Thompson said Monday in her 15th-floor office looking out to the Rhode Island State House.

She finds it's unbelievable that through all the years, across many U.S. senators, including Edward Kennedy, that no other qualified African American lawyers were named. And just two women?

“It’s ridiculous," she reflected. "But a lot of it depends who’s president. To be quite honest with you, right now our current president has no interest in being anything like that. He’s not interested in looking in a judiciary that reflects the demographics of the country at all. And the proof is in the folks he’s chosen to appoint, which does not mean that they are not fine people but they are not diverse people by any means. At least for the most part they’re not."

Thompson attended Pembroke College, then the women's college of Brown University, as protests broke out nationally over the Vietnam War and civil rights issues.

"The nation was at a point in its history where it was trying to find its footing as far as a change and social justice," she said. Federal courts were making key rulings in areas of constitutional and criminal law, prompting her to apply to law school.

A professor at Brown warned: "'Don't forget that there are a lot of black lawyers who are working in the post office.'"

She decided to attend Boston University School of Law, in a year in which about a quarter of the class of 400 was female — a historic high. The women worked to find their voice, master their classes and establish supports.

One shocking moment occurred in a criminal law class. "We were getting ready to study sexual assault, and the professor said they define rape as assault with intent to please," she said.

The women marched straight to the dean's office with their concerns. "Maybe that joke used to go over when there were no women here, but that's not making it now. It's not funny," she said.

She recalled, too, black students participating in a meeting about their standing. One white professor told them he personally didn't think they were qualified to be there, she said.

"He said 'I attribute all of you being here to affirmative action ... I don't think any of you should be here,'" she said. Upset, angry, the student pondered how to remain positive.

"You have to be optimistic that you are going to be part of the positive change that you have faith will occur," said Thompson, who grew up in segregated South Carolina.

After graduation, she received a fellowship — the same one her late husband, District Court Judge William Clifton, received — that landed her at Rhode Island Legal Services. She was part of a small cadre of female lawyers in the courtrooms "fighting, fighting to be heard."

"For the most part, most of the judges were pretty good. Some were trying to get used to us being there. The male attorneys were trying to get used to us being there," she said. Being well prepared was crucial.

Thompson's advice to young women in law: "If you don't take risks, then you never have a chance to be selected for something. If you do take risks and someone says no, no will not kill you. It will make you more resilient ..."

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.